


the minute that you run

by dreamsthebirds



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Americana, adventures in stylistic self-indulgence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 17:47:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamsthebirds/pseuds/dreamsthebirds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thor's filling up outside Tulsa when a pickup roars by with two horns curving long and mean from the hood. He chokes on the dust cloud it kicks up, then laughs, and keeps on laughing halfway to Texas.</p><p>(Just a little Americana!AU ficlet that had been kicking around my subconscious long enough to become a nuisance.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the minute that you run

Thor's filling up outside Tulsa when a pickup roars by with two horns curving long and mean from the hood. He chokes on the dust cloud it kicks up, then laughs, and keeps on laughing halfway to Texas.

*

He kicks at the trash under a pay phone in Amarillo, listening to Jane listening to him. He wants to tell her about the horns, but can't find the words yet. "Come home, babe," she says softly into the silence. He thinks of her yellow sundress, skin-warmed and wearing at the seams.

"Soon as I can," he says, and means it. There's a job in Albuquerque, hard hours and good pay; a summer's worth of sweat to keep the gas on through the winter. Jane is kind enough to pretend to believe that's why he's on the road again, for the fifth time in five years, running up the miles on his battered Ford like he'll win something when they get high enough.

He listens to the sound of her turning pages, to the occasional scratch of her pen, until finally the story climbs up his throat and crouches ready on his tongue. "I used to wear this red towel," he says, passing a hand through his hair. "When I was a kid. I'd wrap it around my shoulders and pretend I was Superman. He'd seen a bullfight on TV or something, I guess. He said I was a matador and kept coming at me with his fingers up like horns."

He doesn't say Loki's name, but Jane knows who he means. She hums, accepting the story without demanding the moral of it, and he wonders what it must be like to know someone only from the shadow they cast.

*

Loki had said once, Liar and preacher are just two words for the same thing, and had laughed right through the heavy fall of Daddy's hand. Thor thinks of the defiant red stain of his brother's smile every time he passes a church.

*

"What's he like?" Jane used to ask, back when it seemed like she might need to know.

Smart, Thor would say. Funny, he would say, frowning when the word didn't quite fit the way he wanted it to. Bit of a lone one, but we were real close. 

Eventually he got tired of trying to force the strange serpentine coil around his heart into a shape that would have made sense to her. He's Loki, is all he'd say now, if she still asked. Just Loki.

*

To this day he doesn't know where his sharp-eyed riddle of a brother came from. Momma had just passed and Daddy was long gone by the time they found Thor's birth certificate creased and forgotten in an old storage box.

Tucked into its folds was a faded Polaroid of Loki as an infant, Baby Laufey scrawled along the bottom, a lock of blue-black hair taped to the back.

"Loki," he'd said, and hesitated, because he had nothing to add to the story but the parts Loki already knew. A whole life together. A lie so good it kept on being true even when you knew better. "It doesn't matter."

Loki had turned the picture over twice in his hands, then shrugged and tossed it back into the box. "Water under the bridge, I guess," he'd said.

They'd packed up the rest of the basement, shook hands with the realtor on the way out, and Thor hadn't heard from his brother in the six years since.

*

For a long time he had tried to think of Loki doing okay somewhere, holding his own in a city mean enough to justify his vicious side. He's not so sure anymore. Loki, he thinks, didn't ever make that much sense on his own.

*

A motel sags across an acre of asphalt a few miles outside Albuquerque. His room has a view of a leaf-choked pool and, beyond that, the glow of the city pushing up against the lowering sky.

Tomorrow, there's a job. Tonight, there's a bar on the other side of the parking lot with a green neon martini glass pulsing in the window. He'll have a burger, and a beer to wash it down. He'll watch the game.

He'll look up every time the door opens.

**Author's Note:**

> The author has no idea what this even is. She also has no regrets.


End file.
